How to Rightly Divide the Word of God on Ordering Our Loves
A furious debate erupted last week on Christian X (Twitter) over the ordo amoris, or the order of loves. In a widely shared interview clip with Fox News, Vice President J. D. Vance argued that the modern liberal has wrongly inverted human love by prioritizing ‘love for humanity’ before love for one’s fellow citizens or even family. Instead, Vance articulated what he called an “old school, and I think, very Christian concept” of rightly ordered loves: “you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.”
Vance was immediately attacked by progressive Christians eager to flex their ‘upside-down kingdom’ theological muscles. Rory Stewart called it “less Christian and more pagan”; a certain Joash Thomas, boasting of his academic cred for being “trained at one of America’s top conservative evangelical theological seminaries,” assured us that the ordo amoris is not a Christian idea but a Western, individualistic one; post-evangelical and heretical pugilist Zach Lambert proclaimed that Jesus had taught the exact opposite in Matthew and Luke. Vance, of course, hit back, telling Stewart to “google” ordo amoris, and that besides, it is common sense. A general discussion and debate ensued across X and other social platforms.
This debate is critical for this single reason: are the teachings of Jesus, and thus the core of Christianity, anti-political? Do they refute and dissolve natural relations, both familial and socio-political, that almost every civilization across history has assumed? Is modern liberalism, which inverts the natural order of loves, therefore more Christian than pre-liberal societies? Finally, does Christianity preach a universal and homogenous state that current nation-states should strive for by liquidating borders and boundaries and elevating both the dignity of all individuals and the love for humanity writ large?
While many looked to Augustine and Aquinas for proof of the ordo amoris, for evangelicals, what matters most is what scripture teaches. Do Jesus and Paul support the natural order of loves or do they preach a different ethic?
Christ, the Destroyer of Families
Typical evangelical teaching on what Jesus has to say about marriage and family tends to stress the revolutionary aspects of Christ’s words and actions. These scholars point to a number of occasions in which Jesus seemed to turn natural relations and affections on their head.
For example, when Jesus’ mother and brothers came to get him at one point in his ministry, Jesus turned to the crowd of his disciples and rhetorically asked, “Who are my mother and brothers?” Jesus answered his own question with the astonishing claim that “Here are my mother and brothers! For whoever does the will of God, he is my brother and sister and mother” (Mark 3:31-35). Teachings like this seem to weaken, if not destroy, natural family bonds and expand the family to include all those who follow God and Christ. Even at a young age, Jesus showed disregard for his family when he stayed behind at the Temple without telling his parents, and when they found him, he dismissed their concern by claiming that they should have known he would have stayed in his Father’s temple (Luke 2:41-51).
At other times, Jesus taught directly against the family. “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to earth. I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” Such sentiments made Jesus sound more like a Zealot revolutionary than the promised Messiah. Yet he continued in even more shocking fashion: “For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Matthew 10:34-36). In his teachings on discipleship, Jesus proclaimed, “if anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26).
In general, Jesus’ exhortations to discipleship and loyalty to the kingdom of God seemed to displace and deprioritize natural family ties. Jesus’ comments about the seriousness of discipleship emphasized the zero-sum nature of following him: the Son of Man has no place to lay his head, and thus, if you follow him, you might not either (Luke 9:58); do not worry about burying the dead but instead proclaim God’s kingdom (Luke 9:59-60); and those who only follow Christ half-heartedly are not fit for service in the kingdom of God (Luke 9:61-62). When the disciples complain that they have left everything for Christ, Jesus insists that those who have “left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands” for the sake of him and the gospel will not fail to be repaid a hundredfold (Mark 10:28-31).
For these reasons, it is not surprising that some Christians conclude that Jesus was against the natural family and sought to supplant and replace it with the spiritual family of Christian believers in the institution of the Church.
The Natural Family in the Teachings of Jesus and Paul
While these passages are striking and arouse curiosity (and perhaps horror) in readers, Jesus (and after him, Paul) reinforced and strengthened natural family ties as commanded by God in the Old Testament. In Matthew 15, when the Pharisees and scribes come to Jesus accusing him of breaking the tradition of the elders, Jesus turns the tables on them and reveals that they had been violating the fifth commandment that children honor their father and mother (verses 1-6; cf. Exodus 20:12; Mark 7:9-13). Behind the scenes, Jesus was combatting the Jewish tradition of corban, whereby grown children could exploit a loophole in the law in order to avoid providing for their elderly parents. Jesus puts an end to this: honoring your parents means providing for them in their old age, which requires prioritizing one’s natural family in the use of one’s wealth and material possessions.
In fact, when Jesus answered a lawyer’s question about the greatest commandment by claiming that “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:34-38), he was summarizing the first five commandments of the Decalogue, including child-parent relations. Thus, loving God with all your being requires that children honor their parents. Likewise, Jesus’ assertion that the second greatest commandment is to love one’s neighbor was a summary of the last five commandments of the Decalogue, including the injunction not to commit adultery (Matthew 22:39-40; cf. Exodus 20:14). Thus, to love one’s neighbor means loving one’s spouse uniquely by being faithful in marriage and avoiding all sexual impropriety.
Jesus elsewhere reinforced Genesis’ teaching about the sacredness of the marriage covenant and the prohibition on divorce (except in extreme circumstances; Genesis 2:24; Matthew 19:1-9; cf. Matthew 5:31-32; Mark 10:1-12; Luke 16:18), and he heightened the standards of lust as adultery (Matthew 5:27-28). Jesus was also favorable toward children, who were often disparaged and overlooked in his time, as he gathered them to him and taught that the kingdom of God belongs especially to them (Matthew 19:13-15; Mark 10:13-16; Luke 18:15-17). That Jesus supported marriage, procreation, and the family as intended by God is also demonstrated by the life of the early Church, which was characterized by the rejection of divorce, adultery, incest, polygamy, infidelity, infanticide, and abortion. The Church was known for these things because they followed Christ, not despite their allegiance to him.
In the letters of the Apostle Paul, we find even stronger statements about the centrality and importance of the natural family. Everyone is familiar with Paul’s exhortations to Timothy about providing for one’s natural family: “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8). Paul does not merely say that such neglect is sinful; no, instead, it is paramount to denying Christ. Thus, to proclaim faith in Christ, to live out the gospel, and to serve in the kingdom of God requires that believers prioritize provision and protection for their immediate family and blood relatives. In the same passage to Timothy, Paul also reinforced godly loyalty and religious duty toward one’s household, especially toward one’s parents (1 Timothy 5:3-4).
Paul also elevated the marriage relationship in Ephesians 5. Wives are to submit to their husbands in a way that they do not submit to anyone else and that such submission is “as to the Lord” (verse 22). Likewise, husbands are to uniquely love their wives unlike anyone else—as if she were his own body, willing to give up his life for hers (verses 25-28). The marriage bond between husband and wife, Paul asserted, is special in that it alone represents the relationship between Christ and his Church (verse 32). If Jesus and Paul are said to disparage marriage and natural family relations or to place the spiritual kinship of believers above natural kinship, then what Paul teaches here makes no sense. From the beginning, Paul says, God intended marriage to be an archetype of Christ and his Church (verses 29-32). This requires that Christians maintain and prioritize the sacredness of the marriage bond and its obvious consequences: children and family. Only when this is done will we truly be able to grasp the parallel nature of Christ, his Church, and the relationship of believers to one another.
The Hard Passages
What, then, are we to do with the ‘hard passages’ mentioned above? In some cases, we should investigate lexical issues and reinterpret the verses more accurately. For example, in Luke 14 where Jesus tells his disciples that if anyone does not “hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brother and sisters” then he cannot be his disciple, the word for hate—μισέω, miseō—has a semantic range that can include hatred and detestation or disfavor and disregard. That Jesus has the latter in mind is clear from the fact that Jesus would not command that we hate even our own lives (Luke 14:26) while at the same time love our neighbors as ourselves (Matthew 22:39)—unless we believe Jesus was a schizophrenic lunatic. In context, Jesus is helping his disciples properly order their loves, and he teaches that love for God, for Christ, and for the kingdom of God must be prioritized above all else—even blood relatives, spouses, and our own interests. As in other places (as with letting the dead bury the dead), Jesus uses hyperbole to shock his listeners and communicate the severity of his teaching.
The principle that emerges from this and other passages is that when there is an irreducible conflict between competing loves and loyalties, Christ calls us to love him above all else, being willing to leave behind all earthly goods and relations. This becomes clearer when we look at the Matthean parallel to Luke 14:26. There, Jesus proclaims, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37; emphasis added). It is not that love for Christ requires that you hate your natural family; only that you must love God more than them, and, if facing a zero-sum choice, you must follow Christ over kin. Jesus himself experienced this as his family and hometown continually misunderstood who he was and obstructed his Messianic mission (Mark 3:21; Matthew 6:1-6; John 7:1-9). He had to be willing to forsake them in order to be obedient to God—although it is clear that Jesus did not desire this, for he called his own brothers and mother and relatives to follow him as his disciples.
Therefore, when Jesus proclaims that he came not to bring peace but a sword (Matthew 10:34) and to set family members against one another (Matthew 10:35-36), this is not prescriptive but descriptive. As the dying and rising Messiah and the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, Jesus requires total allegiance and love from his disciples. He will suffer no competitors, and he knows that natural family affections are the greatest temptation for his disciples to forsake him. Thus, in the starkest terms possible, Jesus makes it clear that his life and ministry would be painful for many who would have to make this choice.
This is why, however, Paul exhorts Christians not to be bonded in an unequal marriage union with unbelievers (2 Corinthians 6:14), for it is in exactly these situations that love for Christ results in the family being divided. Paul also describes such a situation in diametrically opposed and antipathic terms: “For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Or what fellowship has light with darkness?” Neither Jesus nor Paul desired this result, but they fearlessly taught Christians what was required of them in this imperfect life. Jesus does not leave it at that, however, for he comforted those facing such painful losses by proclaiming that both now and in eternity they would be repaid with an abundance of those very things they had forsaken for Christ (Mark 10:29-30).
Conclusion
If we prioritize love of Christ and loyalty to God above all else, and if we understand the whole counsel of scripture regarding marriage, family, and Christian discipleship, we will easily grasp that the ordo amoris for Christians means that we love God first, then our natural family, then our spiritual brothers and sisters in Christ, and then the unbelieving neighbor around us. It is only when we displace love for Christ at the top with other things—human, animal, material—that our love has become deeply disordered and we must heed the warnings of Jesus as to the costs of discipleship.
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This whole conversation of “Ordo amoris” (to whatever extent it should even exist in Christian theology, I still have my major concerns) is a blatant distraction.
The Trump/Vance administration and their Law and Order mass deportation platform is self-admittedly built on lying about the populations it is targeting (“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do” Vance’s defense of the dog eating “story”), and intended to instill fear in those its targeting (“I desperately hope it has a chilling effect on illegal immigrants coming into our country” Vance’s justification for making arrests in churches and schools).
This isn’t ordered love. This isn’t even pragmatic tough love, an appeal to the injustice of scarcities, or necessary enforcement of law and order (none of which are particularly Christian in of themselves, but could be excused in a secular government), this is vile hate campaign to demonize the other.
To prove I’m not a complete contrarian, I even agree with most of this article. A certain level of order is required in the church particularly through the family unit, this is made repeatedly clear, as Crenshaw points out. But in very skeptical of how much further we should take the concept, or else many of Jesus’ teachings (chiefly the parable of the Good Samaritan) become nothing but vapid hyperbole to maintain the status quo (which Jesus directly claimed to be disrupting).
Eagerly waiting for Curt and/or Karen to comment…
I would certainly hate to disappoint Nathan here. I don’t want him scarred for life.
It isn’t only Augustine whom we should consult, but Martin Luther King Jr. as well. When speaking against the Vietnam War, King pointed out that the victims in Vietnam are also made in God’s image and that nationality and distant didn’t stop him from having concern for them and opposing the war conducted by his own nation. Perhaps King was using words to apply the sword about which Jesus referred.
We might also want to add that Jesus throws our order into confusion when he redefines the concept of neighbor. And technology has increased the size of our neighborhood because we hear and read more and more about the whole world.
Also, when we generalize the old ad slogan that said ‘friends don’t let friends drive drunk‘ to include neighbors don’t let neighbors practice injustice, we find, as King did, that there comes a time when one has to side with those who are farthest from us against what those who are closest to us because of what the latter are doing.
Finally, we go back to what Jesus said about why we should love our enemies. For if we only love those who love us, what do we gain? After all, even the heathen do that.